Unfortunately, some scammers have been sending out email that looks like it came from an email account at kmfms.com. As of this writing, the emails had a "Reply-To" address of "aaa2@kmfms.com" and attempted to get people to submit their login information to a fake PayPal website. Please be aware that we would very much like for this to stop, but the email address is completely forged and the scammers aren't using the KMFMS servers in any way. This is the equivalent of somebody forging a return address on an envelope - they can put your name and address as the return address and you can't stop it because you don't know who it is or where they are. In this particular case, the email address doesn't even exist - if you send an email to "aaa2@kmfms.com" you will see that it will bounce back to you because the account doesn't exist.

How can the spammers/scammers be stopped then? In the case of the PayPal scam emails, there are at least two organizations that it would be appropriate to report them to. First of all, PayPal is obviously one of the entities that the scammers are attempting to defraud, so please report any such email you receive to PayPal. The other organization would be the hosting service that the scam website uses. This might actually be multiple organizations.

Before attempting to get a website taken down, please make sure that it is indeed a scam website, otherwise you may be falling for a "Joe job". Miscreants will sometimes send out email with links to a particular site that they want to get shut down in the hope that enough people will complain. Also, viruses will sometimes insert the URL in the message to match the forged "From" address to make the email more believable. Please exercise caution here - for example, if somebody sent you an email telling you to go to "http://www.cnn.com/" to update your PayPal information, it is probably somebody trying to get CNN shut down, not somebody actually trying to steal your PayPal information. On the other hand, if the URL looks like "http://www.paypal.com-webscr-login.cgi-bin4.us/webscr.php?cmd=LogIn" (don't actually go there - it was a scam site), somebody probably is trying to steal your information. Even then it's not a sure thing since some websites allow DNS wildcards, which means you could type abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.example.com and it would show you www.example.com.

One way to be certain that it is a scam site is to actually visit the site, but please take appropriate precaution when doing this. Some websites have malicious content which could harm your computer and allow it to be controlled by criminals, so please be certain that you are using the most recent version of a secure browser before visiting a questionable site (or just use 'netcat' from the command line if you know how to do that). We recommend that you use the most recent version of Firefox. With that said, if you visit a site and it has a PayPal login, but it isn't paypal.com, then it is almost unquestionably a scam site and you should proceed with reporting it to the proper authorities.

Who do you report malicious websites to? There are many options: the web hosting service, the DNS registrar, the DNS hosting service, and the netblock owner are all good choices. Sometimes one company may be providing more than one of these services, but in other cases this can give you more than one party to complain to, all of whom can render the site useless. You can use the "What's that site running?..." tool at Netcraft to track down a wealth of ownership information for the site. From there, you can contact the organizations involved in order to report the site.

As for the spate of PayPal scam emails that were sent in May, 2005 with forged kmfms.com email addresses, we are offering a $100 reward for the first person to provide information to the authorities that leads to the arrest and conviction of whoever sent the scam email. We know that's not a lot of money, but we are doing what we can and we wanted to make it clear that we are interested in making this stop. We have actually received death threats from people who did not stop to consider that the "Reply-To" address was probably forged (the police know who you are), and this obviously only serves to compound the problem when innocent people are threatened.

With that said, while we are aware of the current scam that uses a forged kmfms.com email address and that it is in no way connected with our servers or current users, it is conceivable that in the future a malicious user could make use of our services to send inappropriate email. We definitely want to know if this is the case for future email. In particular, if the email is marked as being from someone other than "aaa2@kmfms.com" and the IP addresses in the headers indicate that it was sent from either kmfms.com or everyone.net, then please forward the email to us with headers intact. Before forwarding the email, please review the IP addresses in the headers to make sure that it allegedly passed through a server we have some degree of control over (i.e., kmfms.com or everyone.net). For more information on how to read the IP addresses from your email headers, please see http://www.stopspam.org/email/headers.html .

A lot of people have been sending in questions about Linux recently.
We're thrilled at the growing interest in this great operating system
and we encourage everybody to become educated on its many
benefits. In the interest of helping those seeking education on
Linux we wish to point out that there are other websites which
are much better equipped to handle your Linux questions.
The focus of KMFMS is Microsoft and not Linux, so we would like
to offer the following Linux-centric sites as starting points
for those people interested in Linux:

Do you want to find out what Linux is and what it can do
for you? The following sites offer introductory material on
Linux:

Are you wondering whether the hardware you have will work with
Linux? Chances are it will, but checking for compatibility before
installing is always a good idea. Redhat has
a compatibility list
which is quite extensive and is updated in a timely manner.
You can consult this list even if you are installing a Linux
distribution other than Redhat because if it works with Redhat
it will most likely work with other distributions as well.

Are you concerned about the availability of particular
programs under Linux? Relax, there is a lot more software
available for Linux than most people would expect. All the
essentials are there - web browsers, email programs, office suites -
and a lot of more specialized software is available too.
There are, in fact, a lot of programs which run in Linux but
not in Windows. To make the deal even sweeter, a lot of programs
which cost significant amounts of money in Windows have free
equivalents in Linux.
Take The Gimp
for example. The Gimp (a program originally built for Linux and other UNIX variants and only later expanded to run on Windows) is an
image editing program that is on par in many respects to
Photoshop (which runs on Windows or the Mac platform). The
difference is that Photoshop will run you several hundred
dollars while The Gimp is free. One of the major benefits of
Linux is that you can download and try out a lot of great
programs that would run you several thousand dollars if
you were to try the equivalent in Windows. For a
fairly massive listing of programs that are available for
Linux, take a look at
Freshmeat.

Quite a few people have asked if switching to Linux will
affect the availability of the games they play. Lack of games
used to be one of the big weak points of Linux, but that is
rapidly changing. A lot of big name games are now being
released for Linux in parallel with Windows (for example,
Quake and
Civilization Call to Power
are two of the many big name games that are now available).
Sites such as happypenguin.org
and linuxgames.com are
great for getting an idea of what's available. If you can't find your
favorite game on Linux, don't despair - there's always the chance
that it will run under WINE,
a Linux program that lets you run Windows programs. In the worst
case scenario (which is certainly better than just running Windows)
you can install Linux on your
computer in addition to Windows and reboot into Windows when you
want to play a game that doesn't work in Linux.

You are welcome to post to our
"Support for Switching"
forum with questions and comments. We can't guarantee that
somebody will help you, but perhaps you'll get lucky.

Because of the small size of the KMFMS staff, orders are batched up and
shipped every 3-4 weeks. This is why the order form
says to allow 3-4 weeks for delivery time. If it has been more than four
weeks since you placed your internet order (or more than 6 weeks since you
placed your mail order) then please let us know, but if you placed your
order more recently and you haven't received it, then it's probably because
it hasn't been shipped yet. Canadian residents should allow an extra week
for delivery.

There are a bunch of reasons, but it basically boils down to the fact that
this is a small operation and we don't have the resources to handle foreign orders.
Some of the reasons include:

We aren't prepared to deal with the taxes that would accompany shipping to several
dozen countries.

We aren't prepared to keep track of all the different shipping rates that
it would require and neither is the third party credit card company we're using.

Foreign orders require customs forms to be filled out by hand and this is not easily
automated like the other parts of the operation. Software automation is one of the
reasons that the whole KMFMS project is feasible.

However, if you are in a foreign country and are interested in becoming a KMFMS
reseller we'd love to hear from you (you would need to buy in quantities of 24 or more
and you would receive a bulk discount as well as a link from the KMFMS website).

Actually, the alternatives page is meant as an intro for people who think that
Microsoft is synonymous with software - it's not meant as an exhaustive list
of alternatives. Listing all the alternatives out there for every category would
only detract from this goal by overwhelming uninitiated readers.
So, the alternatives that we chose to list are the ones that
we have personally used with great satisfaction. If you would like to
recommend some other alternatives, you are more than welcome to post
your suggestions to
the KMFMS discussion forum on alternatives.

While we do get a lot of requests for odd sizes and other articles of clothing,
very few of them seem to be for the same thing so they would generally require
something to be custom made. Unfortunately, because of the size of the current
operation, we can't custom make anything.

Hey, we like BSD as much as the next guy (the KMFMS
webserver originally ran OpenBSD when it was co-located),
and when we were originally kicking around the idea for KMFMS we did in fact want
to do some artwork with a daemon. However, upon looking into the legality of using
a daemon we were informed by Marshall Kirk McKusick that
he has a copyright
on the BSD Daemon image and he would want royalties on all products sold. Now, we had
made it clear that we would not be using his images, but we would be creating our own from scratch
(no pun intended) which from our limited understanding of the law seemed to not
require his approval since his copyright would apply to his illustrations of the daemon
and not to daemons in general since it's not a trademark, but hey, we figured better safe
than sorry and decided to just stick with the unencumbered penguin.

KMFMS stands for Kein Mitleid Für MicroSoft.
It's a German acronym meaning "no pity for Microsoft."
For those of you who were expecting the 'K' to stand for kill because that's what
you thought it stood for in KMFDM, KMFDM is actually a German acronym meaning
"no pity for the majority."

We asked nicely.
At the time of KMFMS' inception,
BRUTE!'s website
had contact information for those wishing to commission a piece of
artwork. The contact information is probably still there if you
want your own personal artwork and have a bit of money to burn
- it was money well spent for us.